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How do you write a masterpiece? It’s inside you, you know it’s inside you: How do you get it out? Well, if you’re William S. Burroughs, malingering and malefacting through the mid-20th century, you follow a procedure that resembles something from the nonsense kitchen of the poet Edward Lear, one of his recipes for Gosky Patties or Crumbobblious Cutlets. The instructions, roughly speaking, are these: flit around disreputably between Tangier, Copenhagen, Paris, and London, with coat-hanger shoulders and a love-starved face; irradiate yourself with drugs; consort with boy prostitutes and petty thieves; when you write, spew, expelling without stint the untreated matter, comical and terrible, of your low-life dream life (plot, character, structure—the hell with all that); enlist a couple of your loopiest friends to help you organize the resulting mess; do this for years, drifting chemical years, an endless process, until a publisher of erotica and the avant-garde tells you he wants a viable manuscript in two weeks, at which point you and your friends go into furious sleepless sweatshop mode. Amass, excise, compress! Or to put it in Lear’s terms: “Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of window as fast as possible.”

Laid out for us in Barry Miles’s enormous new biography, Call Me Burroughs, is the stringent program of dependency, disorientation, and artistic dereliction by which Burroughs brought himself, in 1959, at the age of 45, to the authorial climax of The Naked Lunch. Perhaps disorientation is the wrong word, actually, because Burroughs always knew where he was, knew himself to be a citizen—perhaps one of the few conscious citizens, at the time—of a floating, borderless nation-state whose shrines hovered invisibly over pharmacies and late-night diners and whose laws were enacted in rented rooms, in low company, with super-heavy eyelids. When the owner of Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, snapped his fingers in Paris, Burroughs (although weakened by opiate withdrawal) answered the call of duty. With the artist Brion Gysin doing last-minute typing, and the South African poet Sinclair Beiles running back and forth between the druggy hotel room and the typesetter, The Naked Lunch took shape. Or refused to take shape. “The book’s final sequence,” writes James Grauerholz in the Burroughs anthology Word Virus, “was mostly determined, at Beiles’ suggestion, by the ‘random’ order in which chapters had been finished and sent for typesetting; but Burroughs would later pose the paradox: ‘How random is random?’ ”

The Naked Lunch, to misuse the theologian René Girard’s characterization of the Bible, is “a text in travail”—which is to say that it contends with itself, it ruptures itself, it leaks ectoplasm all over the bookshelf. It is also a work of exalted and orthodox modernism, a mind-blowing collage that might be—in fact, let’s just say is—the truest successor to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. “Moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death”—here is Eliot’s spiritual catastrophe translated onto the global vibrational plane of junkies in the dawn, and Eliot’s voices and visions accelerated, with a loud whine and a smell of burning, to the speed of science fiction. By cosmic coincidence, Burroughs and Eliot were both from the well-to-do side of sleepy St. Louis, although a generation apart: “Bill’s mother,” writes Miles, “had waltzed with Tommy Eliot at dance class.” Burroughs would later attend one of Eliot’s lectures at Harvard, noting with approval the older man’s decorousness.

The Beats’ influence, their electricity, passed ultimately not into literature but into rock and roll.

But if Eliot was Burroughs’s kind-of celestial uncle, remote and austerely sane, his blood brothers were his fellow loonies of the Beat Generation. Allen Ginsberg was his devotee, then his lover, then his champion. In Tangier, Jack Kerouac typed up portions of The Naked Lunch, and supplied the book’s title. The Beats constituted a metaphysical insurrection and a mutual-blow-job society, and their influence, their electricity, passed ultimately not into literature but into rock and roll. Burroughs, a late bloomer writing-wise, was the most cerebral of the crew. His writing prior to the implosion-consummation of The Naked Lunch zigzagged between tabloid hyperbole and alienated cool (Queer, in particular, has the feel of an early Godard movie); his writing after The Naked Lunch was scarcely writing at all. Embracing “cut-ups”—literally, scissored columns or slices of print, rearranged in defiance of sense and narrative—and privileging his rattiest paranoiac twinges, he cranked out page after page of oracular drivel: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express … “Word dust everywhere now like soiled stucco on the buildings. Word dust without color drifting smoke streets. Explosive bio advance out of space to neon.” These books do have their fans, some quite distinguished: Marshall McLuhan read them as “a kind of engineer’s report of the terrain hazards and mandatory processes which exist in the new electric environment.” Best to see them, perhaps, as a prose analogue to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music: four album sides of twisting, howling feedback in which are buried (legend has it) classical motifs audible only to the recently electroshocked.

The Burroughs of Miles’s 600-plus pages is both ghastlier and more impressive than previous models, sliding through the world like a cross between Sam Spade and Flat Stanley. Niceness, the socially lubricant quality of being nice, had an absolute irrelevance in the Burroughs scheme; love itself, he told one interviewer, was a “fraud perpetrated by the female sex.” Call Me Burroughs begins in a sweat lodge, with the attempt of a Navajo shaman to purge the 78-year-old Burroughs of an entity called the Ugly Spirit, a tenacious occupying demon with an eyeless skull-face. It was the Ugly Spirit, Burroughs believed, that had possessed him on the night of September 6, 1951, in Mexico City, when he semi-accidentally shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer. He was attempting, at her suggestion, to shoot a glass off the top of her head. The events of that night, on the natural and the supernatural planes, would become his literary origin story. As he explained in the preface to a 1985 edition of Queer, “The death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

Burroughs was a clinical mind in a voodoo universe, and the Ugly Spirit could move him to pettier ends as well. Call Me Burroughs records a quasi-magical revenge attack on a Boulder deli from which two of his opiated friends had recently been thrown out. First, Burroughs arranged for a surreptitious tape recording to be made inside the deli—ambient noise, kitchen clatter, waitress-customer banter—and then, days later, with equal surreptitiousness, he played it back from a cassette recorder inside his coat as he sat at one of the tables. As Miles writes: “Over the next hour he increased the volume so that you could just about hear it, but no one appeared to notice.” Yet subliminal damage was being inflicted: discontinuous time streams, information feedback. “After forty-five minutes … one of the waiters threw down his apron and stalked out, followed by the owner, arguing loudly. The owner returned and began to scream at the serving staff, sending two of the women running to the ladies’ room in tears.” Burroughs, psychic vandal, was 63 years old at the time of this incident.

Genuine squalor always contains the possibility of holiness, and every hustler pays his back taxes to the truth, but Burroughs was not a moralist. Redemption? No thanks. He was, however, a ferocious and self-abandoning artist, half insane with the future, and quite dedicated to the destruction of a worldwide control conspiracy whose instruments were language, time, and meaning. Call Me Burroughs ends with the old boy, having survived an improbable 83 years, padding around Lawrence, Kansas, with a gun on his hip. He wakes at 8 to take his 60 milligrams of liquid methadone, naps, reads, feeds his cats, gets high, carps in his journal about his non-abduction by aliens (“Why are abductions and contacts always to mediocre or inferior minds? Why don’t they come and see ME?”). Until, on August 2, 1997, at 6:50 in the evening, a cardiac arrest propels his soul—where? Toward hell, heaven, purgatory, the bridge of a throbbing starship, or, more likely, some fractured limbo of his own invention.

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During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

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In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

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“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

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Updated at 2:20 p.m.

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Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

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